Responding to recent reports about the contents of the taxpayer-funded Canadian Museum for Human Rights, in Winnipeg, the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has begun a national educational campaign raising concerns over the CMHR’s failure to include any significant exhibit dealing with Canada’s first national internment operations. Thousands of Ukrainians and other Europeans were needlessly imprisoned, forced to do heavy labour, disenfranchised and subjected to other state-sanctioned indignities between 1914-1920, branded as “enemy aliens” not because of anything they had done wrong, but only because of where they had come from, who they were.UCCLA’s new postcard has a cover quotation from the late Mary Manko Haskett, a Montreal-born child interned with her siblings and parents in the Spirit Lake camp, in Quebec. The card also underscores how what happened to Mary, and thousands of others, is a Canadian story that must be told in a Canadian museum, particularly one dedicated to human rights. UCCLA is calling upon MPs, Senators and the general public to question why the story of Canada’s first national internment operations is being forgotten in a national museum supposedly dedicated to telling human rights stories.For more on UCCLA, please visit www.uccla.ca. To see this postcard, please go to www.uccla.ca/UCCLA_Post_Card_Collection/images/UCCLA074.jpg

The Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (L’Association ukrainienne-canadienne des droits civils) is a non-partisan, voluntary, non-profit research and educational organization committed to the articulation and promotion of the Ukrainian Canadian community’s interests and to the defence of the civil liberties and human rights of Ukrainians in Canada and elsewhere.